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This won't replace the User or Reference Guide for MicroStation/J, you will want to keep them at hand. It does give a good second look at the basic concepts in MicroStation.
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Churchill's views would today seem prehistoric - he was against universal suffrage, for example. Likewise, the narrative suffers somewhat for having been written in a time of universal chauvenism. This does not detract from the book - it's always necessary to judge people relative to the times in which they lived, and Churchill's life took place in a time of immense social and military change.
It's clear that the author respects and admires Churchill, but not to the detriment of his objectivity. He does not gloss over Churchill's heavy drinking, lack of fashion sense, or child-like impatience. He does not dwell on them, either, instead moving quickly from story to story to give a sense of the personality of the man, not a detailed analysis of his political or social views.
This book is a fascinating glimpse at the man behind the legend. It's too bad it's been out of print for some time, but it's not too difficult to find used - I gather the book did well, so there's lots of copies out there.
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The story concerns Brian Miller, an archaeologist who has "graduated and has a degree and all", but makes a practice of slipping small artifacts in his shirt pockets, instead of leaving them in situ and cataloging them properly. Miller then inexplicably leaves the dig site to go home to New Orleans and visit with his chums, taking the ankh and some other purloined items with him.
Miller's chums, Lewis, whose lifestyle "allowed him to enjoy an unbelievable social life and the love of many women", and quiet Eric, are an odd pair who hurl hateful insults at one another and then claim to be only joking.
Before long, the magical, stolen objects start wreaking havoc before releasing the demon Lilith into our universe and the streets of New Orleans, forcing the three pals to join together and battle it out with the forces of evil.
The book is full of unintentional screamers and horrible dialog. Taylor, 23 when he wrote the book, writes like a Gen Xer speaks, without concern for the rules of grammar or punctuation. The plot is simplistic and full of filler; Taylor wants to write about the funny things he and his buddies used to say to each other more than he wants to tell a supernatural tale.
In one bewildering scene, an Algerian worker from the archaeological dig site, seeking revenge both for being fired and for the theft of the ankh, follows Miller onto the New Orleans-bound plane with an attaché-case full of explosives. Rather than detonate the bomb while airborne, which would at least kill Miller, the fellow waits until the plane lands, leaves the case behind, then tries to escape the blast by running and shoving people out of the way.
Moments later, after the nearly-empty plane has exploded, maintenance workers (MAINTENANCE WORKERS - investigating an airplane explosion?) discover the remains of a passenger seated on the plane with pieces of the detonator all over him. Neat trick, considering he would have been incinerated and it would have taken FAA investigators weeks to piece it together. Oh, yeah. He also had just escaped the plane by running and shoving people out of the way.
Upon release from her interdimensional prison, the demon-mother Lilith heads straight for Bourbon Street, where she lives it up with a passel o' Pina Coladas (she doesn't have to pay - she just hypnotizes the bartender) at a strip club, then sets up shop in an adult entertainment center. Ahem.
During the course of the story, one of the intrepid heros changes into a bright orange dragon, Brian Miller crumbles to dust and a kindly old professor keels over in a death scene so funny you'll have to read it twice to make sure it's as bad as you think it is.
There's a cyborg, too, but it makes my head hurt just to think about it.
On the one hand, I applaud Robert S. Taylor for having the fortitude to sit down and actually write 300 or so pages of fiction. That takes motivation and integrity. But to publish it as is, without bothering to edit, is both presumptious and deceptive. At least when one buys a professionally published novel, one has the expectation that the book will have been read by more than the author's immediate family and that someone might have tried to make the book readable. With the emerging world of self-publishing, we have no such safeguards.
"Artifacts" is a stinker of the first degree.
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While this book is fairly academic it is very interesting. I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a serious collection of essays on burma. For a more emotional read try The Stone of Heaven by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. It details the corrupt business of jade mining in Burma and is a real heart wrencher. Anyway, for Taylor, A-.
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The play has usually been considered to be nothing more than a glorification of Athens, but, of course, in more contemporary terms it is worth reconsidering this Greek tragedy as a look at the problem of political refugees. This comes approach focuses on the debate the Athenians have over accepting the refugees. In this context it is not simply that Athens is a great place because it accepts the children of Herakles but rather that doing so is a political action of some significance; historically we know that the Athenians were not as generous as Euripides depicts them, but then we also recognize that the tragic playwright was try to inspire his audience. There is also a clear sense of the refugees as being heroic rather than pathetic, not only because of Macaria's willingness to be sacrificed but simply because they have survived. You can consider every refugee to be a success story because they have survived and made it out of their troubled homeland alive.
"The Children of Herakles" works well as an analog to "Medea," with the one play dealing with the topic of how Athens treated refugees and the other touching on how the city tolerated foreigners. However, as with other plays by Euripides, such as "Trojan War," this tragedy is also a meditation on the effects of war. This is one of the shortest plays in Greek drama, but it is arguably one of the most complex of the plays of Euripides. The play suffers from having a particular character dominate the action or a truly great heroic scene and this is never going to be one of the first Greek tragedies anybody is going to look at (indeed, it apparently was never performed in the United States until just recently). But even if it comes at the end of your study of Euripides, it is still a play worth considering for what it says about the playwright and his attempts to inspire his Athenian audience.
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